Saturday, November 09, 2013

Hunting Harper

The RCMP appears eager, perhaps too eager, to see senator Pam Wallin charged with fraud and breach of trust. Curiously, we haven't heard a peep about prosecuting senator Mike Duffy. Fact is, that day may never come.

As we know, the prime minister's office saw swept clean of any trace of the Wright-Duffy-Harper under-the-table cash scandal. There's no correspondence, no e-mails, not so much as a phone message slip or a post-it note.

Duffy's lawyer, responding to an RCMP request for documents, has apparently handed over 200-pages of e-mails, correspondence and other records. By some accounts that's about a quarter of the materials to hand.

Now, if you were representing the Cavendish Cottager and determined to keep him from facing criminal charges and if you possessed, as Duffy's lawyer Don Bayne claims, materials that directly implicate the prime minister, would you ensure those documents reached the hands of investigating officers and, eventually, Crown prosecutors? I sure would.

Imagine if the Crown eventually did decide to prosecute Duffy. That procedure involves the prosecution making 'discovery' of all evidence relevant to the case to the accused's counsel. On that list would have to be the incriminating documents you yourself had handed over. Then the investigators and prosecutors would be on the spot, having to account for what they did with that information.

It's going to be pretty hard to take Nigel Wright and Mike Duffy down and not Stephen Harper if he was also a party to it. You just can't erase the prime minister from the record.

Bad enough that Wright-Duffy-Harper is being investigated by the RCMP's "sensitive investigation" section, a title that fairly reeks of privilege and favour. Of course only the RCMP and Don Bayne (and probably a few others) know just what documents have been turned over and what is in them but it's conceivable that Stephen Harper might just have been added to the suspects list.